The B.C. Era

self-released; 2008

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The first time I played this EP was in my car, and I had to turn the bass down immediately because even on my shitty hand-me-down Dodge Caravan speakers, it was all I could hear. That's not an altogether uncommon occurrence, but it usually doesn't happen with stuff I downloaded for free online. Free downloadable rap usually means mixtapes with shitty sound-quality and obligatory obnoxious yelled DJ ad-libs. It doesn't usually mean lush, full-bodied Southern slow-creep stuff, well-recorded music that gives itself some room to breathe. That The B.C. Era sounds so good speaks to Bobby Creekwater's situation. He's one of the token Southern rappers on Shady/Aftermath, which, thanks to the almighty Dre/Eminem/50 triumvirate, is maybe the single most successful rap label ever. But these days, Dre and Eminem can't get it together to release their own albums, let alone those of their talented underlings. And so Bobby Creekwater remains in some moneyed limbo: not starving, not anxious, but not able to get his stuff heard unless he releases it directly to the internet. Which he did.

The B.C. Era only barely qualifies as an EP; at nine songs and 30 minutes, it's practically as long as Illmatic. That's long enough that it gives us a strong idea of Creekwater's aesthetic sense and short enough that it doesn't outstay its welcome. The production comes either from Creekwater himself or from unknown associates like D. Focis. That's a red flag, but this thing sounds great. The beats are so expansive and intricate that at times they almost become oppressive. Organs blare, horns bleat, drums explode. But it's never intense; all of this music unfolds at a lazy crawl, sunny and elegiac at the same time. This is car music, not club music, and we rarely hear this sort of warm thump anymore. It's Southern rap in the organic, bluesy mid-90s Dungeon Family/8Ball & MJG tradition, not the Casio bloops that dominate the market now. And the one exception, the skeletal bass-heavy knock of "When I Go", recalls an even older age without simply recreating it.

Most rappers would try to yell over beats this grandly all-consuming just to be heard, but that's not Bobby's style. His rapping voice is slow and deliberate but also expressive and melodic, somewhere on the continuum between Young Bleed's flat mutter and T.I.'s melodic twang. And so he inhabits these tracks, sinking into them rather than popping off them. Even his boasts are smaller-than-life, conversational everydude shit-talk rather than transcendent ghetto-superhero noise: "I see you niggas on that rap rap rap/ Shit, you need to be filling out a app app app." When he talks about his money, it's on a small, approachable level: "I'm not the early bird but I'm fashionably late, mayne/ Convertibles made me hate rain." If he was talking about his Learjet, I'd call bullshit, but yeah, I can believe he could afford a convertible.

Creekwater never mentions Eminem or Dr. Dre by name, but his situation does come up incidentally a couple of times. "Shady Records, name a label we ain't outsold," he says, which is cute but sort of sad, since Bobby Creekwater himself has sold basically no records. And even if his label boss wasn't off in a Vicodin stupor somewhere, Creekwater would have a tough time being heard. These are lean times for intimate, small-stakes rap like this, and it's a shame that he had to dump all this onto the internet for free. But be glad he did. He didn't have to or anything.